Composite materials have received potential applications in different fields. The major problem encountered during the machining of composite materials is the flank wear and surface roughness. For this study, metal matrix composite material namely Al/SiC_p was considered. Mathematical modelling and experimentation results on the effect of wear and surface roughness were presented. In this work, neural network has been used for machining parameter optimisation. On comparing the results produced from neural network model and mathematical modelling, the results of neural network model were found to be more accurate and nearer to the experimental values.